


sound check

by sinead



Category: NSYNC, Popslash
Genre: Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 18:46:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinead/pseuds/sinead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>JC keeps waiting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sound check

**Author's Note:**

> (Made up. Not true. Chimerical. Fanciful. Imaginary. Suppositious. Fiction.)

It was funny, thought JC, that when he and Justin had been on MMC and Justin had been a punk kid who attatched himself to JC like a barnacle, JC had dated one of the girls on the show. She wasn't a great performer and she didn't stay with the show very long, but she was sweet and tolerant of Justin's unstoppable determination to spend every minute he could with the two of them. Mandy, thought JC, her name was Mandy, and she was much more patient with Justin than JC himself had been. "C'mon," she would say gently, when he started to lose his temper.

The other funny thing was that he couldn't really remember Britney very well at all.

* * *

One day, when there had been another coy non-denial denial planted by their respective publicists, and when Justin had spent every rehearsal break cooing audibly into his cell phone, JC cornered Chris.

"Do you like Britney?" he asked, feeling like he was wrenching the words out. After he said them, he felt slightly sick.

Chris looked at him gently for a moment and then said clearly, "she's got mean eyes, and she reminds me of every girl I really couldn't stand in high school."

JC nodded and didn't say anything. His eyes felt hot.

"Don't worry, baby," Chris told him, "it'll never last." And then he rubbed JC's back comfortingly, and chattered about the upcoming cd release until their break was over.

* * *

As it turned out, Chris was right. Britney began dating someone from her management office, "some asshole in a suit," Joey said quietly, who was older, and not famous. Chris thought she didn't want to share the spotlight, and JC agreed with him, but didn't say so.

They were all sitting in the studio lounge eating lunch one day, with MTV on in the background, when her new video was shown for the first time. No one said much of anything, and Justin watched with tight lips for about half the song, before he got up and left the room. Joey and Chris looked at one another. Lance turned his gaze away from the tv and said wearily, "girl's gonna catch pneumonia." JC got up and turned off the set, and then forced himself to sit back down and talk, rather than go find Justin.

* * *

They finished the new cd and prepared for the tour to support it after the release. Preparing for the tour meant weeks and weeks spent in Orlando, practicing the new choreography, until every muscle screamed in protest, and JC, who never had trouble sleeping, was too tired to fall asleep at night.

They started working on the choreography for "It's Gonna Be Me".

At first, Wade wanted to have a part during the final chorus where Justin and JC would move across the stage to meet in the center, and lean in close, and stare into one another's eyes while Justin sang the final "it's gonna be me." They practiced it that way for days, Justin slinking across the stage toward him and snarling "it's gonna be _maaaay_" into his mic, while JC tried not to look directly into his stormy face, tried to stop his vision at the end of his own nose. Just when he was getting to the point where he knew he wouldn't be able to stand it for the whole tour, and started trying to come up with a way to get the choreography changed without it being apparent that that was what he was doing, the arrangement of the song was changed, and Wade decided that the move no longer worked, which was a relief. JC had waited desperately for it to get easier to look into Justin's astonishing eyes and grin--"smile, JC! for godssakes," Wade would shout--while Justin sang that line, but it never did.

* * *

The venues were so big now that they couldn't travel with enough crew to handle everything, and so there would be sound techs, and stagehands, and some security all hired by the local promoter. The show was so complicated, it took hours to set it up, and sometimes the sound checks dragged on and on while the effects were adapted to the configuration of the stage, and the sound engineers made sure the changes didn't affect the set-up of the mics and the monitors. They would stand onstage in a swarm of strangers, and JC tended to lose sight of the others when they weren't actually singing.

It was in the middle of the sound check in Los Angeles that some problem with feedback started causing their headsets to squeal, and Chris yelled, "goddammit!" and wrenched his out of his ear. "Why don't you guys take fifteen," said the sound engineer, and JC instantly lost sight of everybody as the techs swarmed over the stage, which worried him. He walked back toward their dressing room, and spotted Lance, who looked tired, and then Chris and Joey, who looked bored and pissed off and tired. He didn't see Justin, and so he kept going, past the entrance to the dressing room, past the electricians and the light panel, and back into the bowels of the stage.

"Justin?" he called softly. "J? You back here?" There was a sound, and then he saw Justin, sitting hunched on a pile of coiled cable, and pressing his fists into his eyes as he tried to cry silently. JC knelt in front of him and put a hand out to touch his shoulder, and somehow Justin ended up with his face pressed into the front of JC's shirt.

"She was gonna meet me here, C. We were gonna do stuff." The phrase "do stuff", in Justin's muffled and wavering voice, was almost more than JC could bear, and he wrapped his arms around Justin's head and shoulders and closed his eyes. This is nothing, he thought. This is a moment, like the times you comforted him when he fell down during a dance rehearsal or got mad and frustrated because his voice was changing.

After a while, Justin grew quiet, and he turned his head so that his ear was pressed to JC's heart. "You remember Mandy from MMC?" he asked.

"Yes," JC said. He was trying to keep his heart rate steady. "Why?"

"oh, nothing, I guess." Justin plucked a little at JC's damp shirt. "It's just, I must have been a real pain in the ass back then, that's all."

  



End file.
